The emergence of mobile computing over the last quarter century has revolutionized human social interaction. In many societies, the combination of ubiquitous smartphones and robust wireless network infrastructure for delivering digital media content is transforming the way traditional social tasks are performed. Once exclusively conducted offline, activities such as shopping, dating, socializing with friends, touring new places, and receiving professional advice are rapidly moving to digital space. As the amount of digital content available and the use of digital social platforms increases, more sophisticated forms of online reputation, cyber security, data analytics, and artificial intelligence will emerge. Advances in these areas have the potential to make social interactions over the Internet feel more natural, secure, personal, and meaningful.
Journaling is the centuries old practice of keeping track what happens in ones life. Although many approaches and methods exist, traditional journaling was a private activity. The journal or diary was a place for people to record their most personal thoughts and impactful experiences. Whether plucked from the remains of soldiers fallen in battle, etched in stone amongst the ruins of an ancient civilization, or past down along familial lines from generation to generation, journals provide some of the most compelling and insightful anthropologic accounts of the human experience. Historically, journals were personal objects and their contents were typically kept private until after the author had died or published their memoirs. This all changed in the late 1990s with the advent of a new type of journal, the blog.
In the new millennium, blogs on the Internet are nearly as numerous as the connected devices capable of accessing them. Similar to the entries of traditional journals, blogs are written in “posts”—or a series of relatively short, informally styled accounts concerning a particular topic, person's life, or series of events. Digital social networking platforms such as TWITTER, FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, and SNAPCHAT are each fundamentally different formats of blogging. These services capitalize on the human impulse of keeping track of life experiences to generate massive amounts of user created content. Users of these social media platforms can effortlessly post text, photos, videos, and links to information they like or find significant on a personal webpage. This personalized content is then published to a network of users who can view and interact with it.
Ideally, this exchange of ideas fosters meaningful interactions between people who have never met but have a lot in common. Unfortunately, meaningful interactions happen rarely on currently available social media platforms and click bait, mindless distractions, and narcissistic bragging are much more the norm. The invention described herein, improves upon existing social media platforms by bringing more elements of the traditional journaling experience online in hopes of providing more opportunities for authentic, meaningful social interactions. The digital video journaling platform introduces body language, eye contact, and voice tone and inflection into the social networking experience by providing methods of conversing in streaming video. By bring elements of offline social interactions online this invention makes social interactions over the Internet more natural and personal. Additionally, the invention focuses social network interactions on emotions to give people opportunities to forge emotional connections with others who are not physically present.
Moreover, this invention combines its emotional focus with digital image and video processing to develop new data analytics methods. By building a rich contextual semantic affect categorization for self-identified and machine inferred user emotions, the digital video journaling platform can detect emotional intensity and affect duration in uploaded video objects. It can then use this library to match video objects expressing a particular emotion with other video objects expressing the same emotion at a similar intensity with similar affect duration. This user specific library of digital emotion profiles can also be combined with location and affect-based targeting to facilitate more meaningful offline interactions such as dating, socializing with friends, or—in the case of affect targeted advertising—shopping.